October Healthcare News Update

October 3, 2016

Raising an alarm, doctors fight to yank hospital ICUs into the modern eraREAD

ICUs are one of the most crucial departments of any hospital — heroic places with devoted staff who pull the sickest of patients from death. But many ICU physicians say they’re also woefully — and often dangerously — out of date. Six million patients in the United States pass through ICUs each year, and studies show serious and sometimes fatal medical errors are routine. And a recent review published in the journal Critical Care found no major advances in ICU care since the field’s inception in the 1960s.

California’s vigorous embrace of Obamacare, particularly its sharp expansion of Medi-Cal coverage for the poor, has reduced the state’s medically uninsured population by half, a new Census Bureau report says. Three years ago, California had one of the nation’s lowest rates of medical insurance coverage, with 17.2 percent of its nearly 40 million residents lacking coverage, but by 2015, its uninsured rate had dropped to 8.6 percent, the Census Bureau study found

AB72 was one of 10 consumer-protection measures — eight related to health care — signed Friday [9/23] by the governor. They include a law that will require health insurers to notify their policyholders when regulators think their price hikes are too high, and one that will allow people to be informed of their rights to timely access to health care and to an interpreter.